The Volokh, the slashdot and the NYT effects

Back in 2007, Paul Ohm, a law professor in the University of Colorado law school, guest-blogged in a popular law blog called The Volokh Conspiracy. He guest-blogged for one week about two of his papers: "The Analog Hole and the Price of Music: An Empirical Study" and "The Myth of the Superuser: Fear, Risk, and Harm Online." Being more computer-savvy than the average law professor (he has a B.Sc. in Computer Science) he wrote a script which checked the number of abstract views and downloads of his papers from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Both have gone up. Then his posts were linked to by Slashdot, and the numbers went up even more (graph taken from Professor Ohm's paper).

Currently, "Superuser" has been downloaded 1,434 times and its abstract viewed 8,859 times. The "Analog" paper has been downloaded 412 times and its abstract viewed 2,942 times. According to Google Scholar, "Superuser" has been cited 29 times and "Analog" only five, so there is a certain correlation (which I admit I didn't calculate) between downloads and views in SSRN and citations (assuming GS' citation count is more-or-less accurate. Do that as your own risk).

But that's not the entire story. Looking through Ohm's other papers, I've noticed that this paper: "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization" has been downloaded 5,827 times and its abstract viewed 22,528 times, even though it was only published last year. A quick Google search brought up the possible reason: the paper has been mentioned in a New York Times blog, as well as in this site. It has also been cited at least 4 times (GS is a bit confusing because it presents two entries for this paper).Naturally, there are many more variants at work here (for example, the subject of the paper) but I think this is a demonstration of the power of central, as opposed to niche blogs and sites.

Paul Ohm (2007). Do Blogs Influence SSRN Downloads? Empirically Testing the Volokh and Slashdot Effects U of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper

Scientometrics 2.0, part I

Today we're going to discuss this paper, by Priem and Hemminger (2010), dealing with Scientometrics (a general name for Bibliometrics, Webometrics, Influmetrics, and all sorts of other metrics regarding scientific activity). But, before we start, I want to protest First Monday's terrible references format. Sure, it looks fine in-text, with the last name and the year, but at the reference list the references start with the first letter of the author's first name! How am I supposed to know the author's first name? Only Darwin knows.

Anyway, Priem and Hemminger offer a state-of-the-art review of Web 2.0 tools that can be mined for scholarly data. They suggest seven categories of tools, of which I'm only going to mention four in this post.

1. Microblogging - Microblogging means Twitter. Twitter is used by scientists, among others, to discuss papers and conferences. From my experience, many people tweet from conferences under the conference hashtag.

2. Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking services like Delicious, Connotea and CiteULike can be mined and show scientific trends by pointing out the popular papers bookmarked and popular tags.

3. Wikipedia - Wikipedia is popular among students and faculty as a starting point for basic knowledge. For other web users, Wikipedia is often their only knowledge source. So, papers cited in Wikipedia are more likely to have public impact. Indeed, the JCR and Wikipedia citations correlate well.

4. Blogging - By now, blogs are well- established in the web culture. Many scientists, Fields Medalists included, maintain scholarly blogs. When discussing academic papers, those scientists often cite their sources in traditional manner. Excellent examples are posts aggregated by the Research Blogging service.

That's it for today. The next part will discuss other categories of Web 2.0 services with possible scholarly use.

Information Hub Blogs

Information Hub Blogs (unfortunately behind a pay wall) is a relatively old paper by my own prof, Judit Bar-Ilan. The paper content-analyses a set of 15 professional blogs in computer, library and information science. What's especially good about this paper is that is has an excellent literature review about the definition of blogs and the categories they can be classified into (by authorship, content, style...).

The conclusion is that these blogs act as filters and concentrate relevant information ("one stop information kiosks or information hubs"). These blogs are meant to disseminate professional information, as opposed to personal blogs, and rarely deal with the author's private life.